t this was all nothing to the notion of Dowd's spectacles,
which his father sometimes joked him about, and which were represented
by a pair of hollow, glassless iron rims which he had found in the
street. They may or may not have belonged to Dowd, and Dowd may have
been an Irishman in the neighborhood, or he may not; he may have died,
or he may not; but there was something in the mere gruesome mention of
his spectacles which related itself to all the boy had conceived of the
ghostly and ghastly, and all that was alarming in the supernatural; he
could never say in the least how or why. I fancy no child can ever
explain just why it is affected in this way or that way by the things
that are or are not in the world about it; it is not easy to do this for
one's self in after-life. At any rate, it is certain that my boy dwelt
most of his time amid shadows that were, perhaps, projected over his
narrow outlook from some former state of being, or from the gloomy
minds of long-dead ancestors. His home was cheerful and most happy, but
he peopled all its nooks and corners with shapes of doom and horror. The
other boys were not slow to find this out, and their invention supplied
with ready suggestion of officers and prisons any little lack of misery
his spectres and goblins left. He often narrowly escaped arrest, or
thought so, when they built a fire in the street at night, and suddenly
kicked it to pieces, and shouted, "Run, run! The constable will catch
you!" Nothing but flight saved my boy, in these cases, when he was
small. He grew bolder, after a while, concerning constables, but never
concerning ghosts; they shivered in the autumnal evenings among the tall
stalks of the corn-field that stretched, a vast wilderness, behind the
house to the next street, and they walked the night everywhere.

[Illustration: "RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!"]

Yet nothing more tragical, that he could remember, really happened while
he lived in the Smith house than something he saw one bright sunny
morning, while all the boys were hanging on the fence of the next house,
and watching the martins flying down to the ground from their box in the
gable. The birds sent out sharp cries of terror or anger, and presently
he saw a black cat crouching in the grass, with half-shut eyes and an
air of dreamy indifference. The birds swept down in longer and lower
loops towards the cat, drawn by some fatal charm, or by fear of the
danger that threatened th